“The cloud” is a powerful concept and buzzword in modern computing. It promises scalable and elastic capability to allow access and computing power anywhere, any time, so long as a network connection to cloud resources is available. With regard to scalability and elasticity, clouds depend on nodes to provide communication, processing, and storage. These nodes are typically servers and groups of servers which run software to allow the devices to perform or share tasks and data within the cloud on behalf of the cloud or its clients.
This software is typically configured for use on servers or groups of servers and can be resource intensive. It can involve a high level of virtualization and include a wide variety of services utilizing local node resources to expedite processing of cloud activity.